Engaging with stakeholders on sustainability

The importance of letting go of the need to control communications around sustainability

CP Scott, editor of the Manchester Guardian for 57 years, said our most precious possession is our &amp;quot;honesty, cleanness, courage, fairness, and a sense of duty to the reader and the community&amp;quot;. Photograph: Sarah Lee/Guardian

We are launching this sustainability blog because we would like to start a conversation with our many and varied stakeholders.

As you can see from this site, we already open up many of our articles to comments, but we now want to go deeper into the everyday activities we are engaged with on our sustainability journey.

What we are essentially seeking to do is go beyond traditional corporate social responsibility reporting, which often claims to be based on stakeholder engagement, but does not actually allow interested parties to comment on content that is publicly available.

The fact is that we are constantly facing questions and challenges and it's impossible to try to squeeze this into a static annual social, ethical and environmental report which contains information that is often quickly out of date.

For example, in the past few days alone we have been debating issues ranging from how to engage staff in our volunteering initiatives during an economic downturn when staff can feel the 'need' to be seen at their desks, to how to work with the board of directors to further their understanding of sustainability so we can continue to be at the cutting edge of change.

Creating an interactive sustainability reporting site like this is an experiment which few other companies have attempted. There is therefore no real data on the appetite of stakeholders to engage in a dialogue with individual companies through this sort of channel. Even so, we believe this is the way of the future.

I have already spoken at CSR conferences on our approach and been invited to two business roundtables to explain what we are doing and how we are doing it.

Another point of difference between us and other companies is that we are asking all the various staff involved in sustainability across the Guardian and Observer to write about their experiences on this blog. So in the days and weeks ahead you will be hearing from amongst others, our commercial sustainability manager Carrina Gaffney as well as our environmental manager Claire Buckley.

In terms of the media industry in particular, we want to have a go at breaking the historical mould in which news organisations have tended to be very good and giving their own views but not so keen to hear the views of others. The internet revolution has clearly changed all that.

So one of the things we are looking for is to know what you think are the important issues we should be covering on our Living our Values site. We welcome the chance to open a dialogue and to get ideas for how we can improve our performance.

There are a number of areas where it would also be really helpful to be given pointers to information or studies that we may be unaware of. This is particularly true in areas such as the carbon foot-printing of the digital side of our business.

While we have got a reasonable understanding of the impacts of our newspaper business, we are just starting to try to get our heads round the impacts of our digital business, and what we can do to mitigate them.